The establishment of the European Banking Union constitutes a major change in the regulatory framework of the banking system. Main parts are implemented via directives that show staggered transposition timing across EU member states. Based on the newly compiled Banking Union Directives Database, we assess how banks’ funding costs responded to the Capital Requirements Directive IV (CRD IV). Our findings show an upward trend in funding costs which is driven by an increase in cost of equity and partially offset by a decline in cost of debt. The diverging trends are most present in countries with an ex-ante lower regulatory capital stringency, which is in line with banks’ short-run adjustment needs but longer-run benefits from increased financial stability.

We exploit the staggered introduction of liability waivers when investors hold stakes in conflicting business opportunities as a shock to venture capital (VC) investment and director networks. After the law changes, we find increases in within-industry VC investment and common directors serving on startup boards. Despite the potential for rent extraction, same-industry startups inside VC portfolios benefit by raising more capital, failing less, and exiting more successfully. VC directors serving on other startup boards are the primary mechanism associated with positive outcomes, consistent with common VC investment facilitating informational exchanges in VC portfolios.

The chief human resource officer (CHRO) role elevates people-related matters to the apex of the firm. Why do some companies’ leading management teams place so much emphasis on human resources while others do not? The present study argues that CHROs’ presence in the C-suite is driven by firms’ imitation of industry peers’ leadership structures as a response to uncertainty. The investigation also sheds light on the moderating role of environmental factors that can influence mimetic isomorphism in HR leadership. Through a longitudinal analysis of large listed firms between 2006 and 2020, the study shows a positive relationship between the prevalence of the CHRO position among firms’ peers and a focal firm having a CHRO in its top management. The results demonstrate that certain types of uncertainty serve as boundary conditions for such copying actions: Industry growth strengthens mimicking behavior while industry dynamism weakens it. There is no clear evidence for the moderating role of industry competition. The findings contribute a neo-institutional view of human resource structures in the top management and strengthen the bond between the strategy and human resource literature.

The recent advances in automation technology, robotics in particular, have sparked a heated debate over the future of labor and human society at large. The ongoing process of robotization may engender profound impacts on various segments of the labor market. Given the far-reaching implications of robots, it is thus very important to understand the scale and scope of robot use and characteristics of robot users. However, the main challenge is the limited availability of robot data at the microeconomic level (Raj and Seamans, 2018). Due to the data constraint, the bulk of the existing literature relies on cross-country industry-level data from the International Federation of Robotics (IFR). The lack of micro-level robot data makes it difficult to paint a comprehensive picture of robotization in industrial settings, and perhaps more importantly, to assess how within-industry firm level heterogeneity manifests itself in robot use and adoption.